He inhaled and exhaled. Saba smelt stale sardines on his breath.

The next performer, a boy, stood inside the screen, his face gaunt, his eyes half closed. Saba remembered him. He was the boy she had seen in the square on the first night, with a baby strapped to his back. His back was empty now. But he still hunched forward, as if carrying his little brother, he still rocked as if he wanted to put him to sleep. Please sleep my sweet little brother, he sang. Please sleep.

From his pocket, the boy pulled out a balloon that, he said, his father had bought for him as he sent him and his brother to safety after the death of their mother.

As he blew up the balloon, his cheeks inflated. Fattening on his brother’s memory. A gush of wind pulled the balloon out from the clutch of his lips, launching it into the sky of the camp. The same sky which, after many long months saturated with the pollution of grief, began to clear in patches, normality appearing in pockets, while sadness like potholes continued to be scattered everywhere.

After a lull, Tedros stuttered forward with a jug in his hand. The screen wobbled as he entered through the gap in the sheet rather than going round the back. He sat down on the coloured chair, his red eyes piercing through the screen. Saba didn’t blink.

This is not fair, he said. He paused. Taking a sip of his beer, he wagged his finger at the audience: The world forgot us, you say, but we too forgot each other. To survive in this place you have to forget your humanity.

For a drunk person, you are wise, said a spectator, bringing laughter to the cinema.

Tedros picked a yellow flower from the hibiscus tree next to him and put it into his pocket next to the white cloth. He breathed in, his chest expanded. His arms slumped by his side. His jug fell. A splash of beer hit Saba’s arm through the screen. He sang a love song:

Saba Sabina, Saba Sabina, Saba Sabina, Saba Sabina

Aney wey aney, Aney wey aney

His voice trailed off. Behind Tedros, Saba could see the businessman’s compound at the foot of the hill. Saba jumped to her feet.

Sit down, spectators shouted at Saba from behind.

Did the rest of the audience witness the setting of a story yet to be told? Saba wondered. And as she sat back, she noticed her brother and the businessman entering the compound. Hagos, Saba mumbled. The two men sat on Eyob’s bed outside. Hagos’s beaming face overshadowed everything around it. Perhaps it was because of him that Jamal had set his cinema in that spot, Saba thought. Why else, she wondered to herself, did Jamal call his cinema Cinema Silenzioso? Hagos, the silent man who never uttered a word, yet could captivate the audience with his mere presence. A Signora, at attore cinematografico.

But this cinema was another way to tell a story rooted in their tradition, their life. What she was watching was reality, not a film made in the West. What was unfolding before her eyes in the compound she was staring at through the cinema was part of her own life, made in the camp. Two Habesha men gazing at each other, two Habesha men who intertwined their fingers as they kissed in Cinema Silenzioso.